TableEdit was originally written in 2006 by Jim Hu at Texas A&M University for use on EcoliWiki.net. Since then it has undergone quite a bit of change, and needs to be rewritten. Daniel Renfro worked on it over the years, and is undertaking a massive rewrite. (And is looking for help!)

Wiki markup can be challenging. Tables are one of the harder things for new users. TableEdit provides a simple table creation and editing system. TableEdit 2.0 should provide users of Mediawiki software a way to edit tables intuitively using the GUI instead of using markup. It should look and behave in a manner consistent with common applications and current web technologies; to use buzzwords, Web 2.0-ish. The benefits would be similar to those of the Usability Initiative extensions: ease of use for the common user, the power user, and to some extent, the admin. No-one shall ever need to type wiki-table syntax again! (Unless they want to, and that should be allowed by TableEdit, also.)

TableEdit (v1.x) allows users to create and edit tables using HTML forms instead of editing the underlying (and sometimes quite esoteric and complex) wikitext. The user-interface is not intuitive and easy manipulation of existing rows and columns is lacking. The current version of TableEdit allows users to either create a single table, or define a table-template -- which can be transcluded from the Template namespace for multiple table instantiations.

<column>
<heading>GO term name</heading>
<name>go_term</name>
<desc>The name of the GO term.</desc>
<format>go_term_lookup</format>
</column>

<column>
<heading>Reference(s)</heading>
<name>refs</name>
<desc>One or more unique identifiers for a single source cited as an authority for the attribution of the GO ID to this gene product. This may be a literature reference or a database record. The syntax is DB:accession_number.</desc>
<format>textarea</format>
</column>

<column>
<heading>with/from</heading>
<name>with</name>
<desc>This field is used to hold an additional identifier for annotations using certain evidence codes (IC, IEA, IGI, IPI, ISS). For example, it can identify another gene product to which the annotated gene product is similar (ISS) or interacts with (IPI).</desc>
<format>go_annotation_with</format>
</column>

When a user edits a row in a table, it is nice to style the form that they fill out the way you want. Maybe you want them to select a single value from a list of values - the "select" format. The column rules in TableEdit-v2.0 do just this. In the table's template

<format> value

description

example definition

select

Creates a select dropdown menu where the value would be. A default option can be shown.